


By Hounding Culprits Relentless

by BethNoir



Category: Avengers: Infinity War - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, infinity war - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Misery, New York, PTSD, Tony's POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 04:31:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18175886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BethNoir/pseuds/BethNoir
Summary: Tony takes the Q train to the end of the line to see if Steve can stand up.





	By Hounding Culprits Relentless

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote most of this after Infinity War. Realized I should probably finish it and punt it to the internet before we get answers on how it ends. It took me a few weeks to say I liked the movie because the shock was so raw. Last time I felt something like that was the first time I watched the big deaths in Sailor Stars. Respect for going for the jugular, because man did it hit.
> 
> Story deals with very specific themes of grief related to New Yorkers. If it's not for you, no worries. Everyone's got what they can manage. I've got strong feelings about the insincerity of "never forget" from the legion of flag pins and freedom fries, so archive warning is for that.
> 
> Anyway, music of choice is Of Monsters and Men "Hunger", the gloomier stuff of Max Richter's Vivaldi recompositions, and a lot of Nancy Lamott. Title is from the Wikipedia page on the Furies because it sounded like a banger.

\-----

_The men who had gone with him began to come back_  
_They came back_  
_To widows,_  
_To fatherless children,_  
_To screams, to sobbing._  
_The men came back_  
_As little clay jars_  
_Full of sharp cinders_

_War is a pawnbroker – not of your treasure_  
_But of the lives of your men. Not of gold but of corpses._  
_Give your man to the war-god and you get ashes._  
_Your hero’s exact worth – in the coinage of war._

 

The Oresteia

\-----

 

You should go see him, Nat said.

God bless this fucking awful city with its broken subways, the rats the size of Chitauri, and your favorite pizza place that would change from tomato sauce to tomato paste without so much of a warning. Only New Yorkers knew insurmountable grief like this.

Tony walked the streets; a common man among his people. A few tourists would ask for photos, but the rest were raised with good manners. Leave the superheroes alone. They’re just trying to go to the bodega.

“Hey Mr. Stark, when are you gonna-“  
“Not today.” His friend pulled him aside. “Come on, man. Leave him be.”

There was a silence that choked all of them. The torn up pavement and park in Greenwich Village would be repaired. Stark Tower and the MetLife Building wasn’t smashed up by a space portal again. Instead the cut up space was all around them in empty chairs seats on the subway.

9/11 was different. There was shock, but optimism. So many who hadn’t lost people. Countless smiles and good spirit as everyone looked out for each other, ordered schwarma, and kept their chins up. They were New Yorkers. Chaos was part of the deal. Isn't that what happened? They all got through it and went shopping? But there was the smell of burning bodies that soaked the air for weeks. The screaming chorus of PASS alarms from firefighters trapped in the steel. People and furniture and computers and elevators crumbled into dust that coated the air around the island and the lungs of New York’s finest heroes as they pulled apart the ruins to find someone whose family needed peace, only for the ash and dust to eat away at them from the inside out as Congress looked down from on high and asked for paperwork to confirm they were dying. The same Congress that demanded Tony do something about this Thanos. Once again, the cockroaches survived. Even with the snap of his fingers, the bastard offspring of the Dixiecrats survived the mad titan.

Tony decided he would take the subway.

He took the Q train all the way to the end only once, and for the life of him he couldn’t remember when. He was drunk, and young, but that was it.

His phone rang.

“Yeah?”

“Stark.” Her voice was still new to him, but there was a familiar cadence to it, even through the vocaloid. She was just checking in.

“I’m all right. I’m on the train. You and Pepper getting along?” Silence. Plenty of meaning to that too. “Well, probably asking a lot to have strangers make friends right now. If you ask Hap-damn it.” He was gone too and Tony took a moment to compose himself. “Um, look it’s a big compound. There’s stuff to do. You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not gonna take the Benatar just yet, are you?”

“No.”

“Okay. Is that named for Pat Benatar?”

“I don’t know who that is.” It probably was. He’d barely known Quill and the guy had been a walking Family Guy episode. Of course he’d name his ship after an 80s pop icon.

“Okay.” Tony stayed on the line. He didn’t say anything for the ride between Avenue M and Kings Highway. Nebula didn’t either. He tried to think of something for her to do around the compound. It seemed silly to suggest she check out Netflix. The website may not even be working if half the company was wiped out. There might be some video tapes in storage, but letting a superalien cyborg go through his boxes of technological crap was probably a bad idea. It was slightly better than suggesting a nature walk through the Palisades. Maybe if she wore a hoodie.

If this was any other day, he’d have said all this out loud, but who the fuck wanted to listen to him ramble now? Why would he want to hear the sound of his own voice when he was trying to keep Peter’s in his head. He wanted the kid’s horrified pleading to be tinnitus; always screaming in his ears like those PASS devices in twisted steel. Remember the fallen and how you could have saved them.

Withdrawal had nothing on grief.

“Sorry, I’m being uncharacteristically non-hyper verbal,” he said.

“I know.”

“You just calling to see if I’m okay?”

“Yes.” For the daughter of a mad Titan with a constant homicidal bent, that was sweet of her. And he remembered half the universe had disappeared with the snap of a finger. Why wouldn’t she check to see if he was still there? However brief she’d known him?

“You sure you’re okay?” He asked. A longer, pensive silence. Funny how even in the absence of noise, there was meaning.

“No.”

“Yeah, me either.” The sunlight cut out as the subway entered Stillwell Ave Station.

“I’m here. I’m…I’ll be back later. If not tonight, then tomorrow. But I’ll touch base, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thanks, lady.” He had the feeling that she was also being uncharacteristically non-hyper verbal. She struck him as the monologuing type, but maybe she was trying to remember her sister.

What was it about Brooklyn that drew Florida hipsters to the borough? They clustered in Borough Park and Greenpoint, but only reluctantly came to where the earth touched the sea. Would it mean they were too far away from Manhattan for people to notice them? How you needed to be within eyeshot of the city in hopes the rich and powerful noticed how artfully you took your selfies in lieu of doing any real work? Was Coney Island only for Fourth of July’s hot dog contest and fireworks? Or a place to come for some solitude? No wonder he was hiding here. Tony strained to imagine the voices of stickball players, and babushkas and yentas arguing between laundry lines. What it must have been so long ago, teeming with the lives of the new arrivals to America. Now there was only that violating silence unwelcome in New York. And wasn’t everyone else trying to remember the voices of the dead?

The building didn’t look like something that remained from before Barnes was called to war and Rogers followed. There were signs forbidding entry, condemned for all sorts of reasons and in permits as indecipherable as the alien languages on the Benatar or the parking signs on the Bowery. Was it damaged in the fight, or haunted by the dead? Was each retrofitted studio, one bedroom, and two bedroom full of neat little ashen piles undisturbed by the closed windows, while their ghosts lingered and demanded to know why they were robbed of the rest of their lives?

He could handle their heartache. He’d shouldered the wailing and despair of the furious living when he’d returned from the brink of death in deepest space. No wonder the erinyes were women. I’d torn myself apart to bring life into this world. I loved it. I raged against it. I did my best and demanded they live to their full potential, and you stole them from me in the arrogance of the alleged superhuman. Let Thanos answer to the mourners. No wonder he needed incredible cosmic powers to bring them to heel. He knew his voice was too weak against the masses across the universe who had so much more to love and lose.

But it was the faces Tony recognized that he feared the most. Decades of conditioning from PR managers prepared him for handling the demands of the public. There was never anything they could do to prepare him for admitting his sins before his friends. A shrug and a suggestion of “better hope they know you’re sorry.” Floor 8. Apartment K. He was supposed to open the door, and to his concern, he found it unlocked.

Steve Rogers was sitting on the floor, with his back to the wall. His body was imbued with superhuman strength but the heart that could only beat “I could do this all day” came with the original package. The body could take a beating, but the heart was shattered.

“Can I just say from personal experience, it’s never a good idea to drink alone,” Tony suggested. Steve said nothing. He blinked a few times, kept breathing, and stayed on the floor. That was the best he could manage. Tony closed the door and invited himself to cross the room and sit by Steve.

“Let me guess, an old haunt?” A useless comment but the silence was offensive and Tony needed to correct it. The apartment had all the homey charm of early 00s corporate housing. What moron convinced America breakfast nooks were a good look, and was he lost in the Snap?

“They bulldozed it in the 80s,” Steve said. “Just wanted something quiet.”

“You know the condemned signs probably means the place has bedbugs.” Steve’s dead-eye stare suddenly came to life and he grimaced at the floor. Funny how in the maelstrom of supernatural chaos, a mortal threat like bedbugs could remind you how to be normal. Shower, get dressed, put food in you, remember your phone and wallet and keys, and look both ways when you cross the street. Carry yourself until tomorrow and maybe it will hurt a little less. But the grimace faded. The apartment was too clean and furnished. Someone had lived here recently.

“Come on.” Tony patted Steve’s leg. “We need you back at the Batcave. We’ve got a conference call with T’Challa’s people and I want you to meet a few people.” God, it was so easy falling into this schtick. It was like pretending to be sober on Parents Day. Nothing like realizing it wasn’t a coincidence that every fight he’d been in as Iron Man took him to the brink of death.

Steve always felt too deeply. Tony did too, but also understood that’s what alcohol was for. He gestured pointlessly.

“Let’s…” Scream? Hurl ourselves from the roofs? Cut our veins open before the furious public and let them see the despair and misery among blood cells so they can witness and see – see! I’m suffering too!

“Let’s see if we can do something. Bring them back. We’ll think of something. We’re good at that.”

Tony had to prod the bear. He had to get Steve off the floor, and back to some place they could do something instead of sitting with open wounds.

“We’ll get him back,” Tony said softly. And the effect was like Bactine. Steve grimaced again, but not in revulsion. Only pain. Pushing grief back inside his lungs and heart with as much success as demanding your eyes retrieve the tears they had to cast out so you could heal.

“Tony, we had maybe a summer together before he went to war. And I went after him. And I watched him fall to his death. And after every single thing I went through to bring him back, I had to watch it again. When do I get a moment?”

“You saw what he did to Vision. Guy used the Time Stone to bring him back, yeah? That’s probably our best bet.”

“Tony…” Oh God, it’s that same voice Pepper used every time he wouldn’t shut up and kept saying all the wrong things, but it’s even more terrible because it’s Steve and he is in pieces. The purple asshole used the Time Stone to bring Vision back, and kill him in front of Wanda. Vision was killed once, and then he was killed again, and Wanda had to watch. Bucky was killed once, and then he was killed again, and Steve had to watch.

You don’t really know what it’s like to have that person understand you. This was more than Pepper knowing his foibles in and out. This was more than Bucky standing by his scrawny buddy trying to scrap with the Russian kids on Brighton. Ages ago, or it seems like ages now, Steve let it all spill out when they found out Wild Turkey could make a superhuman loose lipped and eager to divulge about his childhood crush.

This was the guy who saw the look in his eyes when they snuck into _It Happened One Night_ to catch a glimpse of Claudette Calbert’s gams, but Steve went red all over and couldn’t breathe as Clark Gable unbuttoned his shirt to reveal no vest of cotton modesty, but sweaty, naked skin. It was the Fourth of July that got rained out and Coney Island went without fireworks. They grabbed beers and laughed at Steve’s lightweight liver as they fell back into Bucky’s rented room from his nonna of a landlady. As Bucky put on Clark’s dandy Mid-Atlantic accent and did the walls of Jericho monologue, detailing how a man takes off his clothes for Steve, who couldn’t stop laughing. Until he was down to his trousers, and it was every man for himself.

“You gonna draw me sometime, Rogers?” he’d asked, drunk and nervous and calling on every bit of bravery he’d borrowed from Steve, as he slid his pants from his hips and let them fall to the floor. His belt buckle and the contents of his pockets hit the hardwood like a thunderclap, and their nervous breathing flowed with the pitter-patter of the rain. Steve had only hesitated for a moment before pushing himself off the bed to reach for Bucky’s neck and pull him in for a crushing, desperate kiss. In hope that the crush of lips and teeth and tongue and skin against skin would seal any space that had ever been between them and they’d never be separated again.

Tony and Steve never discussed what they were. Some argument after the Battle of New York had turned into banter. A look Tony had seen many times before from many other people emerged in Steve’s eyes, and he realized the only way Captain America was a Boy Scout was the uniform. It was there when they needed it, the only uncomplicated part of their lives, and fun. And oh what a mess it had turned into.

“Tony…” Steve said, “if we can find this thing…make it all right again….” Tony nodded, like that was supposed to make it all better.

“I know.”

“I can’t…” Steve said, barely able to get the words out.

“I know.” Tony didn’t know how they got back to earth. He knew Nebula got him on her friends’ ship and flew them back, but he didn’t remember any of it. But to find out from Banner who was gone. And the pedantic purple bastard had the gall to take Barnes from him again? Who the fuck did he think he was?

Was he just trying to set it right again so he could get the rush from seeing it all collapse again? Why didn’t he know how to fucking stop?

“He used to call me a junkyard dog,” Steve said.

“Jesus, that’s not nice.”

“Just meant I’d fight anyone.”

“Oh. Pepper calls me that when I just want to pick a fight and I don’t really mean it.”

“With an alien supervillain?”

“With Congress.”

Laugh with me. Be normal. Give me some kind of reaction because I’m screaming inside and something needs to take the pain away.

“Let me see if there’s a bottle of something around here. Or a box. I’m not picky. I should probably get some solid carbs in me.”

Tony rattled around the kitchen and picked through a box of crackers opened for a Christmas party and left uneaten since then. It was an unwritten rule in American culture there had to be crackers at a party even if everyone hated eating them. As far as he could remember the flavors and textures were just variations on communion wafers. Why was that something they all agreed to? Of all the mundane, yet bizarre commitments they made in this corner of the earth for their species, why the party sampler of crackers? Tony felt weird going through someone else’s belongings, but Christ. What wasn’t weird about this?

“Tony?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Are you just talking in your head so you don’t have to think about it?” Steve was looking at him. He finally got the Boy Scout out of his funk, and he used it to break into his head.

“Just gonna call me out like that, huh?” Tony smiled, keeping up with the new memes. Funny how even after an apocalypse there were survivors to laugh at it, but god, he was trying not to cry. The distractions dissipated and the memories returned. He told himself he wanted to remember Peter’s last words. It was the emotional version of being beaten up inside his suit again. He’d go into the memory when he needed a fix and went back to monologuing out loud.

“You know what’s crazy. I was bracing myself to go to Queens and tell his aunt, but she’s gone too, and half of his friends. I spoke to his principal and the guy just…” he gestured, trying to articulate it, “he just couldn’t speak. He’d nod, but it was like a string was holding him up.” And someone was shaking the string to make his head wobble, but Tony couldn’t say that either. He just flung his hand around and looked away, gripping the countertop to stay upright.

If there wasn’t drink, there was drugs. If there wasn’t drugs there was danger. When Tony went to the brink of death and danger didn’t take him, there was still the threat of so much else he held dear. In all the silence around New York was the memory of the kid’s pleading and the alarms screaming and there was no hysterical relative to take his confession and rage against him for her loss. Only a school administrator who could barely look him in the eye and nod as Tony offered his apologies and whatever resources he could help for the kids and teachers who remained. A hurricane had swept through and tore every single home to the ground but Tony didn’t know how to ask for help. Only how to call the storm and have false hope it would only strike him, and not because he needed the rush of wind and rain.

Peter Parker could have been swinging around Queens and putting his neighborhood back together, but Tony wanted to win a pissing contest with Steve. He was a middle-aged man who dragged a teenager into a grown-up’s fight across the ocean, and he didn’t let go until they were on the far end of the universe as Peter felt every cell of his body breaking away, and he clung to the adult he trusted most and begged him to help him. He was a kid. All Tony had to do was leave him alone and he could still be here.

“You can stay if you need to,” said Steve.

The gall of it. Steve was buried so deep in his grief he was almost paralyzed, but he still pulled himself out of it because someone was in pain. He could do this all day. He just couldn’t watch Barnes die again. Tony had a moon thrown at him and he was still standing. Steve had to say goodbye again, and his heart only kept beating because the fragile thing just didn’t know when to quit.

What a reflex to jump back into battle and save the day, but maybe it was enough to just grieve today.

Tony felt like he was back in college or a convention, offering his body in hopes it would make the other person still like him, when they’d already done everything. But god he just needed to be okay. How else were they going to be whole?

Tony invited himself to run his fingers through Steve’s hair down to the coarse beard. He wouldn’t tip his head up. It was too much to take in, so he dipped down to kiss him. Steve’s hands ran around his legs and held him close.

There wasn’t a rush for orgasm, or a tangling of limbs. It was a long and patient night just in the comfort of knowing the other person was there. You're a selfish, lazy, stuck-up bastard but what a relief to know you're still here for a little longer.

Tony woke up to WQXR and Steve on the phone. Someone on the radio was singing about a coat.

“Hello?...Yeah, he’s with me...I think he’s okay. How are you?...Hey, that’s great.”

We’ll go back when you’re ready. Just remember how to breathe.


End file.
